Annual Kiwi sculpture event broadens our horizons...

Happy Waitangi Day to all our New Zealander readers – for those of us north of the Equator, today is an annual Kiwi holiday, celebrating the signing of the country’s founding documents; the Treaty of Waitangi. Now, to prove we’re not a bottomless fountain of knowledge – we do like to think we’re an honest lot here at We Heart – we’re going to hold our hands up and admit that, before we featured The Oyster Inn on Waiheke Island, we’d never heard of the Hauraki Gulf’s second-largest rock. In our defence, it is on the other side of the world to WH HQ. But this collection of sculpture installations on the same rather beautiful island east of the Auckland mainland suggests we have been guilty of quite an oversight, and it’s time to start putting that right.

The Headland Sculpture on the Gulf exhibition is held every two years and is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2013. It might have passed us by so far, but The New York Times (who have a slightly bigger budget than us, to be fair) puts it in their top 50 places to visit, and tens of thousands of folks from New Zealand and beyond have been taking in the outdoor spectacle since it started. This year they are being treated to the work of a dozen artists; the spectacles range from rural graffiti to urban invasion, from the more conventional to the distinctly abstract. It’s certainly put the place firmly on our map.